Mark Likes Music

Much more disgraceful than The Met's new logo is that the museum lies to the public. If you've ever gone, you'll know that The Met goes to every length to not only obscure that it's free to visit, but actively tries to get you to pay a "recommended" admission fee. In a passive-aggressive move designed only to end a lawsuit for its fraudulence, The Met will now call it a "suggested" fee to enter on its signage . Whether its employees will be more forthcoming with the attendance policy is yet to be seen. This kind of dishonesty is much more hurtful to your brand than any logo-design misfire.

It started with J ustin Davidson's Vulture review of The Metropolitan Museum's new logo, who called The Met's new logo a "graphic misfire" that looks "like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs." Adweek panned it as a "letter-killing, article-elevating, butt-filled logo" and responded with one word upon viewing Wolff Olins's concept samples. Brand New has weighed in, as has Art Net News . Everyone loves to hate logos, which makes sense. I hate logos too: we spend way too much time arguing over marks, defending them, decoding their meaning. I'd rather talk about how an organization treats us, what it says to us, how it make our lives better. 

E-mail, man . It's the worst. Back in the old days, I used to love making that walk down to the computer lab to see if any one of the handful of people who had my email address had fired an electronic missive my way. Staring at that two-tone, black-and-yellow screen, filled with anticipation, feeling that burst of joy at the sight of a line in the inbox: it was the highlight of my day. I still enjoy checking into my trusty Google account, but at work, I avoid my inbox at all costs. It's where my productivity goes to die, and it's not necessarily because of e-mail itself, but how and when people decide to send it to me. I wish more people would follow the advice of Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail , who also takes the time to realign our ethics of e-mail. For one, he dispells the assumption that short e-mails are rude, and asks us to "consider that lengthy emails are disrespectful of others' time." To that end, he recommends we follow a five-sentenc...

It's easy enough to walk into any workplace and hear people bragging about all the multitasking they do, but, as pointed out by Matthew Fritz , what gets undervalued today is the ability to focus and prioritize. Multitasking can be downright harmful:  Rahul Mayak on Twitter  cited a Time / Inc. article by Issie Lapowsky that discusses recent research on  the negative effects of multitasking . One big culprit? E-mail. As Lapowsky points out, almost a quarter of our work time is spent on e-mail , and almost all of it increases multitasking--and tension. According to a study out of University of California, Irvine, when employees were cut off from e-mail for five days, their levels of stress and focus increased. That's not to say that e-mail is inherently bad, but it does show how people use it to pay forward the chaos and instability their own multitasking creates.

I'm really excited about this, because I just embraced the smiley-face emoticon . BuzzFeed now has its own style guide ,  as noted by Megan Garber of  The Atlantic  with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them. The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD , use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email ). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.

On news that Pinterest's growth has been driven by women , we have this from Steve Roggenbuck : fav thi tweet if u want a t-shirt that say "WE'RE DADS, WE'RE ON PINTEREST, AND WE WANT JUSTICE." — steve roggenbuck (@steveroggenbuck) February 2, 2014

Back in December, Tim Smith wrote enthusiastically about how the Baltimore Symphony was using a series of ads-- last week, they won an award from the American Marketing Association of Baltimore --to acquaint the city with its players. The images, done by videographer/producer James Bartolomeo of Protagonist Films, may not lead to a surge of ticket sales or mobs of new fans huddled outside the stage door. But it's always worth reminding the public that real live people are up onstage playing all that Beethoven, Mahler and Bernstein, people with individual personalities and tastes, people worth getting to know. The best thing orchestras can do to raise their profiles within their own communities is to put the focus back on its musicians, and the Baltimore Symphony's campaign provides an effective model of how to use paid advertising to achieve this. But ads alone won't build loyalty: it takes personal appearances where people can meet the musicians face to face, learn abo...

On Flack Me , Jeannine Wheeler profiles the man who started it all for PR people, Ivy Lee : "Tell the truth," he said, "because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn’t like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what people want.” Apparently, this was groundbreaking advice back in the early decades of the 20th century, and Lee became very wealthy counseling some of the most famous industrialists of the time. Famously, he  came under fire from Upton Sinclair while representing the Rockefellers during  the Ludlow Massacre  of 1914-15 in Colorado. It's this contradiction--using the values your mother taught you to help people involved in dubious activities (to put it charitably) come away looking good to their constituents and the public--that makes public relations among the most stressful jobs around .

I got an email from Ragan's PR Daily today that pointed me to David Ogilvy's famous 10 tips on writing . Although he wrote these in 1982, Ogilvy concludes with a rule that everyone who uses e-mail should always follow: If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want. Or at least make a phone call. E-mail was once a nice tool to share information, faster than regular mail and more cheaply than a messenger. Today, it's a stage upon which co-workers can soliloquize and demonize (thanks to CC), and a quick and easy way to pass the buck. So, if you're really committed to solving a problem, if you really want to move things forward, take Ogilvy's advice. Get off your seat or pick up the phone and have a conversation.